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Most people familiar with singer Mandy Barnett associate her name with Patsy Cline. Barnett portrayed the singer in the acclaimed stage musical “Always … Patsy Cline” at Ryman Auditorium on several occasions.

Now, she’s covering someone else’s songs.

“I Can’t Stop Loving You: The Songs of Don Gibson” is available at Cracker Barrel Old Country Store locations, as well as online.

“It’s classic country and is a perfect fit for Cracker Barrel,” Barnett said. “I think a lot of my fans eat at Cracker Barrel and they are the Starbucks of country music.”

Barnett met Gibson about 13 years ago and they became friends. Gibson asked Barnett to record an album of his songs before he died, and this is her fulfillment of that promise.

“I wanted to only include songs that Don wrote, and I wanted to pick the iconic songs,” she said.
The album includes “Sweet Dreams” and “Oh Lonesome Me” in addition to the title track.

Barnett also is playing a tribute to Patsy Cline with the Nashville Symphony at 8 p.m. today and Saturday at Schermerhorn Symphony Center —something she calls “a dream come true.”

Tickets are available at www.nashvillesymphony.org or by calling 615-687-6400.

Award for vocal group of the year to Little Big Town. Karen Fairchild exclaims, "We just got an award from Puffy and Pickle!" at the 47th Annual CMA Music Awards at the Bridgestone Arena in Nashville, Tenn, Wednesday, Nov. 6th. (Larry McCormack / The Tennessean)

The group captured its second win in the group of the year category at the 47th annual CMA Awards Wednesday night. The group’s Karen Fairchild said they had already “been fiercely writing songs like crazy” and now the bar is raised even higher.

“This is such a big honor and you want to live up to it,” Fairchild said. “All we ever wanted to do is make music together and make music for the fans and we’re getting to do that on a bigger platform with things like this.”

Little Big Town released its platinum-selling “Tornado” last year and has enjoyed radio success with songs including the title track and “Pontoon.” Members performed their current single “Sober” on the awards show.

“(This win) gets us ready,” Fairchild said. “We can’t hang our hat on it, but it definitely inspires us towards the future. We’re ready to go in that studio, I’ll tell you that.”

Hunter Hayes looked older and a bit dapper this week leading up to the 47th annual CMA Awards when he showed up on the red carpet at the BMI Country Awards on Tuesday night sporting some facial hair – a change for the usually baby-faced singer.

He laughed that he was going for a “slightly wiser” look and then explained that wasn’t the only change he’s made recently.

Hayes performed his new single “Everybody’s Got Somebody But Me” on the CMA Awards Wednesday night with help from his “buddy ole pal” Jason Mraz, who flew into Nashville just for the performance.

Hayes calls the song “a complete left turn” and said he needed to do something “a bit different” from his last string of hits including “Wanted” and “I Want Crazy.”

“I owed it to the world to stop putting out love songs,” Hayes said. “I needed a breath of fresh air.”

Hayes describes “Everybody’s Got Somebody But Me” as “an honest-to-God song that’s written about the most awkward moments in your life.”

“Love is a beautiful thing unless you’re single (and surrounded by people in love) and then it’s just kind of annoying,” he said. “I had to speak for that side of life, too, because I’ve definitely gone through that. You can laugh about it, and I wanted to laugh about it and it was about time I laughed in a song.”

The performer today announced the dates of her Bangerz Tour, and it includes an April 18 stop in Nashville at Bridgestone Arena.

Details follow her surprise appearance on Saturday Night Live where she crashed the stage during host Edward Norton’s monologue on Oct. 26. She plugged her Bangerz tour before breaking down for first-time-host Norton “Miley's three rules to hosting.”

One included sticking out her tongue in her now-signature pose.

Cyrus’ tour kicks off on Feb. 14 in Vancouver and will visit 38 cities, including New York City, Los Angeles, Toronto and Chicago.

Click here for a photo gallery from Tuesday's 61st annual BMI Country Awards show. Shown here are Hunter Hayes, center, and Troy Verges, right, who won Song of the Year honors for "Wanted" during the awards show in Nashville. (Photo: Steven S. Harman/The Tennessean)

Rodney Clawson, who co-wrote several of the past year’s radio hits, is performing rights organization BMI’s 2013 songwriter of the year.

Clawson, who gave up farming in Texas to come to Nashville at the urging of friend John Rich, moved to Nashville 10 years ago. Since then, he has written 11 No. 1 country songs.

“It’s been cool to see what’s happened with his career,” Aldean said. “He’s written some big songs for us, like ‘Amarillo Sky’ and ‘Johnny Cash.’ I think it makes a song great when someone who is writing it has lived the songs. Rodney writes songs that are believable because he has lived them.”

Hunter Hayes’ “Wanted,” a chart-topping, Grammy-nominated song co-written by Hayes and Troy Verges, won the Song of the Year award.

Click on the photo above for a photo gallery from the Miles & Music for Kids event. Here, Dierks Bentley performs during the Riverfront Park concert, Sunday Nov. 3, 2013. (Photo: Shelley Mays/The Tennessean)

Dierks Bentley led more than 1,000 motorcyclists on a 40-mile, Sunday-afternoon ride from Harley-Davidson of Columbia to Riverfront Park in Nashville to kick off his 8th annual Miles and Music for Kids benefit concert.

Thousands of fans piled into the area just like it was CMA Music Festival in June — with a couple of marked differences. Artists on the Riverfront stage for Sunday’s show included Jake Owen and Luke Bryan, in addition to Bentley — much larger names than regularly appear there during the festival.

And while the artists were hotter, after the sun dropped behind the buildings, the temperatures quickly followed. Fans were bundled in scarves, winter coats and gloves as they bopped along to Owen singing “Barefoot Blue Jean Night,” Brett Eldredge’s recent No. 1 hit “Don’t Ya,” and Chase Rice’s version of “Cruise,” the genre-busting chart-topper that he penned for Florida Georgia Line.

Lights from LP Field and the Shelby Street Pedestrian Bridge glimmered on the river as the sun continued to sink. Thanks to Sunday morning’s time change, the sky was almost completely dark by 5:10 p.m. when Easton Corbin walked out singing “Lovin’ You is Fun” and got fans singing along with his first hit “A Little More Country than That.”

After Corbin’s set, host Storme Warren estimated close to 10,000 people were in the audience, and all of them were on their feet when Bryan emerged a few minutes later.

Bryan kicked off an acoustic set with his most recent two No. 1 songs “Crash My Party” and “That’s My Kind of Night.” “Oh yes, downtown Nashville, it’s good to be playing a little music on a Sunday evening,” Bryan told the audience before thanking Bentley for inviting him to play the event for a second time. Bryan flipped his ball cap around backwards and kept fans clapping and singing with “Drunk On You” and dropped quite the piece of information at the end of the song. He said he nearly cut his thumb off on Friday while making ribs.

On a recent whirlwind visit to Manhattan, she takes full advantage of the city's Japanese cuisine, which, she reports, isn't quite so available in Nashville, where she's spending a lot of her time these days.

But that's her only complaint, if that's what it is, about life in Music City and her starring role in ABC's tuneful melodrama "Nashville" (now in its second season, airing Wednesday at 10 p.m. EDT), all of which she loves.

She plays scheming breakout country sensation Juliette Barnes, who's locked in a love-hate rivalry with country music queen Rayna Jaymes (co-star Connie Britton), whose long reign is threatened by Juliette's rise.

Panettiere nails her role, displaying a deft blend of rapaciousness and vulnerability, not to mention impressive pipes.

In the process, she has pulled off two overarching victories. She's left behind her past signature role, the indestructible Cheerleader in the sci-fi drama "Heroes" — a character that could have tied her down forever. Even more remarkably: At 24, she's crossed that treacherous Rubicon that few young actors navigate, from adolescence to the far shore of adulthood.

"'Nashville' was perfect timing with the perfect character," she says after ordering this and that raw fish. "Juliette is so not the good girl that I played on 'Heroes,' but she has to put on the facade as a good girl to get what she wants. Juliette is tough, but when she cries, she means it: She's a very damaged young woman running from a dark past. How much more perfect could I ask for?"

Sharing lunch with a reporter at a tony Manhattan restaurant, the petite Panettiere is squeezed into jeans and a sweater of proper weight for the ensuing fall weather. Her chopsticks are soon busy while, spared Juliette's Southern twang (Panettiere hails from Englewood, N.J.), she delves deeper into Juliette's psyche, and her own.

Sure, Juliette is the show's resident villain, "but you get to see her inner workings, what she goes through," Panettiere notes. "It's great to show the audience Juliette's terrible behavior, and then show where that behavior came from: not from a place of malice, but of pain.

"A lot of what I've drawn from is my own personal experience," she says. "I grew up in the entertainment industry, in the spotlight, and have had to deal with some of the same struggles. In this business, there are so many doors wide open to walk through and it looks like the normal thing to do. The difference is, I've always had people around me to yank me back before I went too far."

Panettiere's mother was an actress, her father a New York City firefighter, and she made her screen debut as an infant in a Playskool toys commercial.

Since then she's never stopped acting, nor did she imagine doing anything else. But after "Heroes" ended in 2010, she faced a dry spell before "Nashville" came along.

"It hit me," she recalls, "like a ton of bricks: There is a genuine possibility that no one will ever take another chance on me. That was an important gap between 'Heroes' and this show, a huge transition to make gracefully. I don't know how gracefully I did it, but somehow I did."

Callie Khouri, "Nashville" creator and executive producer, said she was unconcerned while casting her new series that Panettiere might still be the Cheerleader in viewers' minds.

"When she stood in front of the camera as Juliette, I saw the character that I needed, not the one she'd already done," said Khouri by phone from Nashville, marveling at her range: "She can go from being the worst little brat in the world to absolutely breaking your heart.

"We asked her why she thought she was right for this character, what she thought they had in common," Khouri added, "and she said: 'Juliette wants to be the best. And that's what I want.' I felt like I was hearing the character talk to me."

Of course, an actress seeming to merge with her character comes with special pitfalls when the character's a bad girl, confirming viewer suspicions that fiction is mirroring real life.

Panettiere acknowledges that Juliette Barnes is exactly the sort of tabloid target she herself has always tried not to become — and not always successfully.

Recently she made public her engagement to professional boxer Wladimir Klitschko, her longtime boyfriend, even as reports of Juliette-like misbehavior raged in tabloid media, alleging "that I've broken up with him, that I've cheated on him, that I'm a home-wrecker, that I've become a mess in Nashville," says Panettiere. "I've been portrayed as a person that I'm so far from being, that I have spent years of my life making sure that I never become!

"We're actors!" she erupts with a dismissive laugh. "That's what we DO: play characters that we're not!"

Click the photo above to see a phto gallery from Hunter Hayes' Saturday-night show at the Ryman. (Photo: Steve Harman/The Tennessean)

Luke Bryan isn’t the only country artist to headline two sold-out shows in Nashville this weekend: Grammy-nominated multi-instrumentalist Hunter Hayes played two sold-out concerts at Ryman Auditorium.

Hayes has three platinum singles to his credit: “Wanted,” Somebody’s Heartbreak” and “I Want Crazy,” and his self-titled debut album also has sold more than 1 million copies. In addition to playing his hits on Friday and Saturday nights at the Ryman, Hayes welcomed special guests to the stage, including country stalwart Ronnie Milsap and Dave Haywood and Charles Kelley from Lady Antebellum.

Click here for a photo gallery from the Music In the Middle site on Thursday. Here, a sheep stands over the festival grounds as "Music in the Middle," a new music festival starting this weekend at Woodbury's Short Mountain Distillery, gets ready for today's opening. (Photo: Samuel M. Simpkins/The Tennessean)

This past June, Paul McCartney and Tom Petty were among major music stars who brought 80,000 music fans to Middle Tennessee for the 12th annual Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival, where nearly all attendees camped on the grounds and enjoyed a weekend of non-stop performances.

In the next two weeks, two brand-new music festivals offering the same broad range of sounds and a multi-night camping experience will set up in Middle Tennesseee: this weekend’s Music In The Middle Fest in Woodbury, Tenn., and the Fly Free Festival in Adams, Tenn. But while the organizers for both festivals admit they’re partially following in Bonnaroo’s footsteps, they’re not looking to fill its very big shoes.

Cameron Sloan of Neon Stanza Events said they’re hoping to have a crowd of 4,000 at Music in the Middle, which opened today and runs through Sunday on the grounds of Woodbury’s Short Mountain Distillery. Fly Free co-organizer Corey Petree is expecting roughly 1,500 attendees at that Oct. 11-13 event at Red River Valley Park.

Those numbers are a far cry from Bonnaroo, but in their eyes, that’s a plus.

Patrick Stump of Fall Out Boys and Kimberly Perry of The Band Perry talk over their parts as they rehearse a song for “CMT Crossroads” on Tuesday at Rocketown. (Photo: Larry McCormack/The Tennessean)

The Band Perry and Fall Out Boy joined musical forces this week to tape CMT’s newest edition of “CMT Crossroads.” The show pairs artists of different genres and documents the journey as they learn and then perform each other’s hits in front of a live audience.

The Band Perry and Fall Out Boy had two rehearsals leading into this afternoon’s show at Rocketown. Lead singer of Fall Out Boy Patrick Stump took turns swapping lyrics with The Band Perry’s Kimberly Perry on songs including the country trio’s hits “Done” and “If I Die Young” and on Fall Out Boy favorites including “My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark” and “Alone Together.”

Tuesday night the bands sat down for a joint interview with the network in which they talked about everything from songwriting and relationships to radio formats and hiatuses, something Kimberly Perry said isn’t in the cards for her sibling trio.

“CMT Crossroads: Fall Out Boy and The Band Perry” will premiere 9 p.m. Friday, Nov. 29, on the network and will include the live performance and excerpts from the joint interview session.

The Band Perry recently celebrated its latest No. 1 song “Done,” and the trio’s new single “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely” is now playing on country radio. Fall Out Boy recently reunited after a five-year break and released its comeback album “Save Rock and Roll” earlier this year.